There are a wide range of consumer and industrial products whose manufacture requires one or more steps, where the mixing of large batches of constituent materials or ingredients must occur. Various improvements in this technical area are shown, for example, by U.S. Pat. No. 5,246,290 to Bolz for “Cone Mixer With Swivel Arm Drive and Sealing Arrangement Lubricated By An External Lubricant Receptacle,” by U.S. Pat. No. 5,649,765 to Stokes for “Conical Mixer Apparatus with Contamination-Preventing Orbit Arm Assembly,” and by U.S. Pat. No. 7,160,023 to Freude for “System for Detachably Coupling a Drive to a Mixer Mounted in a Portable Tank.”
A critical aspect of such mixing of the component parts of a composition of matter, particularly for pharmaceutical products, is that the proportions be within set tolerances, and preferably be as close to an ideal mixture of such ingredients as possible. One difficulty encountered in any type of mixer is that in attempting to aggregate those constituent ingredients from individual containers, there are losses. The losses may occur by the trapping of perceptible amounts of each ingredient within respective containers, especially during the mixing and pouring process. Also, the amount of loss that occurs may vary for each material, depending on, for example, the ingredient's viscosity, the ambient temperature, and other conditions, making pre-determined adjustments to maintain the mixture's integrity not completely/repeatably accurate.
The invention disclosed herein reduces the losses resulting from the mixing of components in the manufacture of commercial batches of a product, and better serves to attain a reproducible and consistently accurate blend of ingredients.
In addition, the current invention also offers improvements in the form of a combination blending machine and lifting device that may accommodate both the transportation and the mixing of components within large sized bins typical for the manufacturing of pharmaceutical and other commercial products.